Anarcho-Pessimism: the Collected Writings of Laurence Labadie
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Anarcho-Pessimism the collected writings of Laurence Labadie ·o ··• Anarcho-Pessimism the collected writings of Laurence Labadie Anarcho-Pessimism collected writings of Laurance Labadie This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. https://creativecommons.org artwork by Raven Ardent Press, 2014 All unattributed essays are by Laurance Labadie. Published by Aragorn Moser Layout by Leona Benton Printed at "The LBC Compound" 1818 Carleton St. Berkeley, CA 94703-1908 Anarcho-Pessimism: The Lost Writings of Laurance Labadie -Chord Biography-Mark Sullivan xix Introduction -James Martin xxv Section 1 1 The Depression Years -Chord Father of Fascism 8 Mental Attitudes 1 7 Fighting and Folly 23 Economic Adolescence 31 On Society 40 Reflections on Liberty 42 Regard ing the "Libertarian Socialist League" 59 Anarchy and Competition 67 Section 2 94 Evolving Experiments With Anarchist Economics -Chord Basic Essentials of the Money Problem 100 The Relationship of Money to the Social Problem 107 Section 3 116 The Misanthropic Years -Chord Infantile Radicalism 124 Why Do Men Fight and Destroy Each Other 127 What is Man? 136 "All the World's a Stage" 138 Education-What For? 141 Regarding Man's Concern with Tr uth 143 Thoughts Evoked by Reading Voline's Nineteen Se11enteen: The Russian Rn1olution Betrayed 14 7 On Man's Thinking 150 War, War, War 156 What Hath God Wrought? 158 As Regards Cosmology 159 Stirn er! 161 Is There an Ab solute Tru th 163 Introduction to Ragnar Redbeard's Might is Right 167 Much Ado About What? 169 Should I Try to Communicate? 173 A Self-Compensating Society 1 76 Political Considerations 180 Scribblings 184 More Scribblings 185 Scribblings 3 186 To the Victims of the So-Called Educational Systems 188 On the Rejuvenation and Perpetuation of the Hu man Race 189 One Way of Getting Something Done 192 The World As We Know It , or Rather, Shall Not Know It 196 What is It Really All About? 208 Waste Not Yourself(poem) by J Labadie 211 Recommended Reading 214 For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. Thomas Ligotti Anarcho-Pessimism: The Lost Writings of Laurance Labadie Chord Collectivism is a "crowd mind" doctrine. To those who have ever been the losers in the unequal, privileged, and despotic struggle fo r existence, who have not fe lt the glory and the satisfaction of conquering obstacles and the achievement of aims, the thought of peace and securit_v is soothing and endearing. Nevertheless, life is essentially a struggle, and peace, in a sense, stagnation and death. We say of the dead that they are at peace. -Laurance Labadie To those who came to anarchism through the over hyped WTO protests of 2000 or by way of the em barrassingly liberal Occupy spectacle (or even via the punk subculture), the unique anti-capitalist analysis of the American individualist anarchists (a drastic departure fromhow most anarchists are dis cussing capitalism today) is likely to seem anachro nistic and slightly alien, as the tradition itself has been rendered almost invisible through scholarly neglect and the pervasive a-historicism that seems to abort every attempt at a serious anarchist revival in the United States. Almost all the prominent indi vidualists of this school were representative of a type of anarchist that is now almost nonexistent-so much that, if mentioned at all, they appear as far away specters and it seems unbelievable that they were ever a force to be reckoned with. The Ameri can individualist school propagated their devastat ingly logical version of anarchism largely in the pages of Benjamin Tu cker's invigorating journal Liberty , between the years 1881 and 1908, and car ried the general anarchist mistrust of external au thority several steps further than the communist and syndicalist camps, denying that the individual owes allegiance to anything except his or her self, and re-conceptualizing interpersonal relations (par ticularly economic ones) on a voluntary contract ba sis-contracts that can be terminated at will and without recourse to societal or legal approval. This language of "contracts" reveals the influence of Proudhon's economic theories on Tu cker and the other American individualists, who became its most articulate expositors in the United States (taking Proudhon's mutualist anarchism into a characteris tically American direction by synthesizing its social aspects with frontier-style individual sovereignty) and developed its implications in various related fields like currency, resource and land monopoly. It was this embracing of mutualist economic principles that most strikingly separated Tu cker and his camp from European individuaFst anarchists and it's also why the American individualists still falloutside the simple approximations and traditional distinctions of "left" and "right". Liberty was a fieryjou rnal de voted to the free playand clash of ideas and not to the exchange of polite nothings; remarkable forthe consistently high quality of its content and for the rancor of its heated discussions, Liberty grew into a philosophical battleground gyrating around the tension between the sovereignty of the individual (sometimes expressed in terms of self-ownership) and the hypothetical economic reforms proposed by Proudhon. The ideas debated in Liberty covered a wider range than just Proudhonian mutualism of course. In addition to a critical disposition towards all authority, Benjamin Tu cker, as editor of Libert:v , had an omnivorous passion for numerous intellec tual fields and the arts and added cultural sophisti cation to the political interests of anarchism, pub lishing of a great deal of European, and especially French, avant-garde literature (including works by John Henry Mackay, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, and Felix Pyat). In the early years of Liberty, Tu cker be lieved-as had Josiah Warren, Proudhon, and Ly sander Spooner before him-that anarchism was based on "a principle of nature," and that a moral argument was sufficient to establish the validity of anarchism. By the late 1880s, though, Tu cker was writing that morality and natural rights were un provable abstractions and myths; this shiftin orien tation came about after his exposure to Max Stirn er's philosophical masterwork The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum). Stirnerite egoism, as interpreted by the individualist anarchists, claimed that enlightened self-interest was the realistic basis of human conduct and that the acting individual and no one else should be the beneficiary of his or her own actions. With this insistence came the rejec tion of altruism and of any obligations except those assumed by voluntary contract-and with these printed assertions began the most controversial pe riod in Liberty's long publishing history! Tu cker and the other American individualists presented a much more nuanced and practical al ternative to the classical communist reading of mali cious capitalism (and to that fabulous edifice of ab stractions we call Marxism). As mutualists, their un failing principle was that freedom of exchange is the foundation of all freedoms. To enlarge exchange is to liberate the individual; to circumscribe it is to enslave them. The American individualists fe lt that a genuinely free market and the unhindered prac tice of competition would organically develop into a stateless, non-monopolistic society that would re turn the fullpr oduct of labor to workers-which is one of many reasons they opposed the forced col lectivized control of the economy (by one vast mo nopoly in the hands of the State) that communists and socialists advocated. Instead, the American in- iii dividualists fe lt that the most successful means of opposition come through more critical methods, such as the slow, skeptical dissolution of power and reigning ideas through a rugged interrogation of the foundations' of one's own belief systems. Tu cker and his accomplices envisioned a revolution that was more gradual, more subtle, and more far-reach ing in its consequences than the one-dimensional class-struggle formula promoted by their commu nist colleagues-an evolutionary revolution that oc curred on the intellectual and economic plane and that was only superficially political. The conscious egoists in Tu cker's faction also didn't busy them selves constructing theories of individual or social rights . They supported Stirner's observation that "right" is an illusion that follows might and based their hopes of individual liberation, and of the dis solution of the State, on a gradual awakening of the individual to his/her own ability to do without the State. This new-found dignity of the individual will then inevitably renounce external support and as sert the inherent power of self and repudiate the State's pretenses of being a patron and guide. This unforgivingly self-reliant version of anarchism re quires more intelligence than most people possess or independence than they can muster and makes it unlikely that American individualism will ever be come a resurgent strain within the prevailing desert of contemporary anarchism (where we see a ho mogenization of anarchism into a bland, anti-statist/ anti-capitalist doctrine which is far too accommo dating of simplistic thinking and ideological confor mity). That being said, there's plenty that's still alive and kicking in the stinging old issues of Liberty and they're substantially more interesting than most of the moldering rubbish out there today. The current lack of awareness regarding the American individualists is puzzling but becomes par- tially understandable when considering that these are some of the more mysterious and dusty back roads of American anarchism, where one will en counter the ghost-like apparitions of James L. Walk er, John Bevereley Robinson and a gaggle of other unfamiliar mavericks who receded from view until the publication ofJa mes J. Martin's magisterial study Men Against The State in 1953, mainly to vanish again into an unspecified historical oblivion.